Césaire, Aimé

Contemporary Black Biography
COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale

Aimé Césaire

1913-2008

Writer, politician

The West Indian playwright and politician Aimé Césaire emerged as one of the leading voices in the négritude movement in the 1930s. Searching for a way to unite the peoples of the African diaspora, Césaire and future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor coined the term "négritude" while studying in Paris in the 1930s. It urged blacks to reject the idea of nationalism as well as that of any white influence upon one's culture, and instead embrace and celebrate one's African heritage. The American poet Langston Hughes was one of the first to adopt the movement in the United States.

The Martinique-born Césaire wrote a number of plays and poems in his native French, but his best-known work translated for English-speaking audiences may be the epic poem Return to My Native Land. Long active in Martinican politics, he served in the French National Assembly as a representative of his island nation for decades; he was also mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city. In a 1995 Research in African Literatures essay, Lilyan Kesteloot called him an "extraordinary man who has profoundly marked two generations of African intellectuals and who continues to stir the students who study him in our schools and universities."

Became Politically Active in France

Born on June 25, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Césaire grew up in a Martinique that had been a colony of France since 1635. It grew sugar and tobacco, and had been the subject of a long battle between the British and the French for hegemony. Once populated by Carib Indians, Martinique was a slave state until 1848, and the descendants of those slaves emerged as a strong political voice on the island nation in the twentieth century. Césaire's political awareness was shaped by his time in Paris, where he arrived in 1931 for further schooling. He fell in with many other black students from other French colonies, especially those from Africa, like Senghor, and was active in the Society for African Culture. Along with Senghor and Léon Damas, he helped found L'Étudiant noir, or "The Black Student," a magazine of black culture and politics in 1934.

Césaire studied at the Sorbonne and wrote poetry during his years in Paris. His major work, Return to MyNative Land, was penned as he planned his return to Martinique. The one-thousand-line poem first appeared in an issue of Volontes in 1939, in the original French, but it caused a sensation. "Bristling with learned words, neologisms, and a hypercomplex syntax, it made a direct hit on the African continent as well as on the intellectuals in the Antilles, and even those of anglophone or lusophone [Portuguese-speaking] Africa," noted Kesteloot.

Return to My Native Land contained the first-ever use of the word "négritude," and the idea incited an entire generation of post-colonial writers and minds, in both the Caribbean world and on the African continent. "The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by denying that we were black," Césaire explained about the concept in an interview with Annick Thebia Melsan in the UNESCO Courier. "I, on the contrary, said to myself that the more we were black, the more universal we would be. It was a totally different approach. It was not a choice between alternatives, but an effort at reconciliation."

Returned to Martinique and Political Struggle

When he returned to Martinique, Césaire taught at a lycée (school) in Fort-de-France for several years, and also served as editor of Tropiques, a magazine that was censored by the French authorities on orders of the collaborationist Vichy government at a time when France, still Martinique's master, was occupied by Nazi Germany. After the end of World War II, Césaire emerged as a leading political figure and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945. The following year he won a seat representing Martinique in the French National Assembly, and was regularly returned to it by voters.

Initially a member of Martinique's Communist party, Césaire abandoned the party in 1957 to cofound and later head the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM). The PPM was left-leaning, but did not call for full independence. Instead it advocated maintaining ties to France but with self-rule, a plan that Césaire helped author in the late 1940s. When this plan was adopted, Martinique shed its colonial status and instead became an overseas département of France, equal in the political sphere to storied French areas like Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur and Bretagne, or Brittany. The island is one of four overseas départements, and has a relationship to France similar to that of Puerto Rico to the United States. Martinique enjoys a much higher standard of living than many other Caribbean island nations because of heavy subsidies they receive from France. "The anomaly of modern-day Martinique is hence largely Césaire's creation," declared James Ferguson in the Guardian. "A part of France—and by extension the European Union—with identical laws, directives and welfare provisions, it is a subsidised first-world enclave in the Caribbean, eyed enviously yet condescendingly by its poorer but independent neighbours."

In addition to his legislative duties in Paris and his responsibilities as mayor of Fort-de-France, Césaire also continued to write. He turned to playwriting in the late 1950s, and the first of his works for the stage to be translated and performed in English was The Tragedy of King Christophe. The work is set in Haiti and follows the true story of King Henri Christophe, a hotel employee who led a rebellion in 1806 and became king of a large portion of Haiti. He ruled as a petty tyrant, and was himself ousted by a rebellion and committed suicide. Césaire's cautionary tale, noted an essay on his career as a playwright in the International Dictionary of Theatre, serves as "an account of political failure. Christophe's inability to free his people from the alienation induced by centuries of colonialism sounds a warning to the leaders of newly independent Africa."

Awards: Laporte Prize, 1960; Viareggio-Versilia Prize for Literature, 1968; Grand Prix National de Poésie, 1982; Commander of the Order of Merit of Cote d'Ivoire, 2002.

Césaire's plays have touched upon other political themes from the history of a post-colonial world. A 1968 work, A Season in the Congo, centered around the independence movement and subsequent civil strife involving assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. His 1985 play, A Tempest, was adapted from the Shakespeare work and features a cast of leading characters who represent the various classes of a post-colonial, African-heritage political atmosphere.

Remained an Influential Statesman

Césaire retired from the National Assembly in 1993 but remained as Mayor of Fort-de-France for another eight years, his term in that office only interrupted once in the mid-1980s. Even after his political career was over, Césaire was still influential: In 2005 he made headlines by refusing to meet with Nicolas Sarkozy—then France's minister of the interior—because Sarkozy's party supported legislation that lionized France's colonial past. Eventually, the legislation was repealed. Despite the snub, and Césaire's eventual endorsement of a rival during Sarkozy's successful bid for the French presidency, Sarkozy respected Martinique's leading citizen. In 2007, with the president's support, Fort-de-France's airport was renamed for Césaire.

Césaire died in Fort-de-France on April 17, 2008, after being hospitalized for a heart condition. His legacy as the politician who cemented the lasting relationship between France and Martinique sometimes stands in contrast with the anticolonial négritude movement he championed as a poet. Césaire himself seemed untroubled by this duality. Interviewed by Melsan in the UNESCO Courier in 1997, he spoke with the same defiance as when he was a college student in Paris six decades earlier: "One is always in rebellion against something, things that are unacceptable, things I will never accept. That is the inevitable way of the world, probably for everyone…. I desire—passionately—that peoples should exist as peoples, that they should prosper and make their contribution to universal civilization, because the world of colonization and its modern manifestations is a world that crushes, a world of awful silence."

Césaire, Aimé

Contemporary Black Biography
COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale

Aimé Césaire

1913—

Writer, politician

The West Indian playwright and politician Aimé Césaire emerged as one of the leading voices in the négritude movement in the 1930s. Searching for a way to unite the peoples of the African diaspora, Césaire and future Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor coined the term "negritude" while studying in Paris in the 1930s. It urged blacks to reject the idea of nationalism as well as that of any white influence upon one's culture, and instead embrace and celebrate one's African heritage. The American poet Langston Hughes was one of the first to adopt it.

The Martinique-born Césaire wrote a number of plays and poems in his native French, but his best-known work translated for English-speaking audiences may be the epic poem Return to My Native Land. Long active in Martinican politics, he served in the French National Assembly as a representative of his island nation for decades; he was also mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital city. In a 1995 Research in African Literatures essay, Lilyan Kesteloot called him an "extraordinary man who has profoundly marked two generations of African intellectuals and who continues to stir the students who study him in our schools and universities."

Born on June 25, 1913, in Basse-Pointe, Césaire grew up in a Martinique that had been a colony of France since 1635. It grew sugar and tobacco, and had been the subject of a long battle between the British and the French for hegemony. Once populated by Carib Indians, Martinique was a slave state until 1848, and the descendants of those slaves emerged as a strong political voice on the island nation in the twentieth century. Césaire's political awareness was shaped by his time in Paris, where he arrived in 1931 for further schooling. He fell in with many other black students from other French colonies, especially those from Africa, like Senghor, and was active in the Society for African Culture. Along with Senghor and Léon Damas, he helped found L'Étudiant noir, or "The Black Student," a magazine of black culture and politics in 1934.

Césaire studied at the Sorbonne and wrote poetry during his years in Paris. His major work, Return to My Native Land, was penned as he planned his return to Martinique. The 1,000-line poem first appeared in an issue of Volontes in 1939, in the original French, but it caused a sensation. "Bristling with learned words,
neologisms, and a hypercomplex syntax, it made a direct hit on the African continent as well as on the intellectuals in the Antilles, and even those of anglophone or lusophone [Portuguese-speaking] Africa," noted Kesteloot.

Return to My Native Land contained the first-ever use of the term "négritude," and the idea incited an entire generation of post-colonial writers and minds, in both the Caribbean world and on the African continent. "The West told us that in order to be universal we had to start by denying that we were black," Césaire explained about the concept in an interview with in a UNESCO Courier writer Annick Thebia Melsan. "I, on the contrary, said to myself that the more we were black, the more universal we would be. It was a totally different approach. It was not a choice between alternatives, but an effort at reconciliation."

When he returned to Martinique, Césaire taught at a lycée (school) in Fort-de-France for several years, and also served as editor of Tropiques, a magazine that was censored by the French authorities on orders of the collaborationist Vichy government at a time when France, still Martinique's master, was occupied by Nazi Germany. After the end of World War II, Césaire emerged as a leading political figure and was elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945. The following year, he won a seat representing Martinique in the French National Assembly, and was regularly returned to it by voters.

Initially a member of Martinique's Communist party, Césaire abandoned the party in 1957 to co-found and later head the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM). The PPM was left-leaning, but did not call for full independence. Instead it advocated maintaining ties to France but with self-rule, a plan that Césaire helped author in the late 1940s. When this plan was adopted, Martinique shed its colonial status and instead became an overseas département of France, equal in the political sphere to storied French areas like Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur and Bretagne, or Brittany. The island is one of four overseas départements, and has a relationship to France similar to that of Puerto Rico to the United States. It is heavily subsidized by France, too, giving it a much higher standard of living than members of some other Caribbean island nations. "The anomaly of modern-day Martinique is hence largely Césaire's creation," declared Guardian writer James Ferguson. "A part of France—and by extension the European Union—with identical laws, directives and welfare provisions, it is a subsidised first-world enclave in the Caribbean, eyed enviously yet condescendingly by its poorer but independent neighbours."

Césaire served as mayor of Fort-de-France until 1983, and in addition to his legislative duties in Paris he also continued to write. He turned to playwriting in the late 1950s, and the first of his works for the stage to be translated and performed in English was The Tragedy of King Christophe. The work is set in Haiti and follows the true story of King Henri Christophe, a hotel employee who led a rebellion in 1806 and became king of a large portion of Haiti. He ruled as a petty tyrant, and was himself ousted by a rebellion and committed suicide. Césaire's cautionary tale, noted an essay on his career as a playwright in the International Dictionary of Theatre, serves as "an account of political failure. Christophe's inability to free his people from the alienation induced by centuries of colonialism sounds a warning to the leaders of newly independent Africa."

Césaire's plays have touched upon other political themes from the history of a post-colonial world. A 1968 work, A Season in the Congo, centers around the independence movement and subsequent civil strife involving assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. His 1985 play, A Tempest, was adapted from the Shakespeare work and features a cast of leading characters who represent the various classes of a post-colonial, African-heritage political atmosphere.

Césaire retired from politics in 1993 at the age of 80. Four years later, interviewed by the UNESCO Courier 's Melsan, he remained committed to the ideals he once detailed in his writings as a college student in Paris. "I desire—passionately—that peoples should exist as peoples, that they should prosper and make their contribution to universal civilization, because the world of colonization and its modern manifestations is a world that crushes, a world of awful silence."

Césaire, Aimé

The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.

Copyright The Columbia University Press

Aimé Césaire (Aimé Fernand Césaire) (ĕmā´ fĕrnäN´ sāzâr´), 1913–2008, West Indian poet and essayist who wrote in French. After studying in Paris he became concerned with the plight of blacks in what he considered a decadent Western society. With Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas he formulated the concept of négritude, which urged blacks to reject assimilation and cultivate consciousness of their own racial qualities and heritage. Césaire voiced this idea through poetry, collected in such volumes as Les armes miraculeuses (1946) and Ferrements (1960) and in the essay Discours sur le colonialisme (1950, tr. 1972). In addition to his literary output, which comprises poetry, plays, and historical essays on black leaders, Césaire helped Martinique shed the colonialism he abhorred and become (1946) a French overseas department. He held a number of government positions, including that of mayor (1945–83, 1984–2001) of Martinique's capital, Fort-de-France, and also was a member (1946–56, 1958–93) of France's National Assembly.